Yenya's World

Fri, 20 May 2011

GNOME 3

After installing Fedora 15 in a virtual machine, I have decided to give GNOME 3
a try. Firstly, it is really slow over VNC. While GNOME 2 has been pretty
usable for testing various new applications in a virtual machine, under
GNOME 3 it is almost impossible.
Here is a screenshot on which I will demonstrate my problems with GNOME 3:

Firstly about the file manager. I use mostly command line for managing
my files, but using a file manager is sometimes handy nevertheless. One
of the features I often use is the "Places" list. In GNOME 3, it is presented
differently in the Places menu and in the file manager itself, which
is a clear usability bug. When I wanted to add another directory there
(I often use ~/tmp as my sandbox),
it took me at least 10 minutes to discover
that "Bookmarks" is what I probably want. And even then, the newly added
bookmark is added to a submenu instead of the main Places menu.
Also, I did not found any way how to remove those useless predefined
directories like Videos, Music, etc.
from the left sidebar. Even when I have deleted them from my home directory,
they still remain in the sidebar.

Another ugliness is that the new window manager does not decorate the
windows properly, and instead relies on the applications themselves
to provide things like resizing handle in the lower right corner
(see the gnome-terminal window). Not only it looks ugly as hell,
it also obscures the space the application expects to be visible.
I will probably file this as a bug report when F15 is officially released,
but I expect in a truly GNOME-ish fasion it to be solved by removing the
"scrollbar on the left side" option :-/.

Anyway, it seems that XFCE+Sawfish combo works as expected, so I am
definitely leaving GNOME when I install F15 on my workstations.

6 replies for this story:

You don't get "real" Gnome 3 without GL compositing, the new WM (not this one) needs it. It is quite different from this and it also has a new panel, without "Places" or "Applications". Given that even "ordinary" 3.0 is still rather incomplete, it's no wonder that this fallback environment is lacking even more.

My desktops were Afterstep (doen not seem to be alive) - Windowmaker (similar) - waimea 0.4 (furter version were totally something else) and then went to gnome. It was not great, but everything worked and I liked the GUI simplicity. Now it looks also to xfce migration, or maybe I will go back to Afterstep, just for fun. I liked downloading plugins as source and coppiling that tiny-lovely one file binaries. I feel like i want to go back to the roots for a while.

I stand corrected, thanks! I have tested a real GNOME-3 on a physical machine (my wife's laptop :-), and after using it briefly, she is also migrating to XFCE now. For me, GNOME-3 looks like a smartphone/tablet UI - oversized title bars and scrollbars are the prime example of that. BTW, does anybody know how to add my own program/script to the list of favourite applications? Do I have to write the .desktop file for it?

What I liked on GNOME-2 was the integration with hardware - it was usable even for my parents. Also the file manager was pretty good. For the first time after many many years I have used a GUI file manager when reviewing the documentation for the new faculty building. It was a three-levels deep directory tree with files named with mixed case, spaces and diacritics (often in more than one charset inside a directory).